Materialism: Two Views from Great Philosophers:

In my thesis, I shall accept the existence of material and non- material world, while expressing the co-operation of both.  The area of study is quite subtle and complicated, but realities support the existence of both. The mind, reason and consciousness are non-material but greatly influential on the material world and physical action. The physical world is equally influential on the non-material world. Our physical body is very much visible and tangible, but we have always had difficulties explaining our thoughts, mind and many other non-material parts of our own selves. 

Materialism, which is physicalism or psychophysical reductionism, suggests that we are merely material organisms. This means that anything non-material, finds its existence from the material world. Materialism farther shows that that the mind is reducible to the brain. Materialism suggests that if we knew every biology, physics and chemistry about our body, we would have nothing left to know about us. Rene Descartes and Thomas Nagel have ideas about those notions.

Materialism, as a philosophical monism, puts it that matter is of absolute importance in nature. Materialism postulates that consciousness and mental actions are both derivations of material interactions.  Materialism bears close relationship with physicalism, which suggests that everything in existence is solely physical. Philosophical physicalism arose from materialism with the birth of the knowledge of physical sciences, incorporating complex ideas of physicality beyond ordinary materials. These include forces and physical energies, alongside dark matters, space-time and many more. Materialism and physicalism are therefore held as synonymous by different walks of thought. 

While subtle issues lace the ideas of consciousness, mind and material substances, great minds like Rene Descartes and Thomas Nagel had various ideas on materialism.  Descartes was a materialist with a huge hint of dualism. Descartes argued that he had no doubt about the independent existence of matter asides consciousness.   He held the notion that the world beyond sense is only largely knowable through the action of reason. Rene Descartes was dualist who believed that mind and matter exist separately but rely on each other.  He knew well that mind and matter existed very distinctively. But while confronted with the mystery of how a non-material thing like the mind could comprehend the physical world, he concluded that there existed an organ in the brain that linked matter with the mind. Descartes hails thought as most important component of our existence and a certain component of the human being.  He has the fame for his maxim “I think, therefore I am” [The Marxist]

Thomas Nagel, on contrary, opposed the belief to reduce mental actions, experience and consciousness to physical explanations (Nagel).  He was much like Peter Strawson in his concerns about objective views of the mind as an external phenomenon to material existentialism.  Nagel stresses that action comes from the basis of mental or psychosocial categories, not reducible to mental or physical terms. While Nagel believed in physical and material components of our existence, he believed that non-material part of our existence was very independent for the material world.

There still stands a great similarity in Descartes and Nagel’s walks of thought. They both know the interconnection between mind, thought, consciousness and the material world. In essence, they know that one influences the other in one way or the other.  Non-material elements like mind and consciousness and the material physical world still influence each other. The two brain houses also believed in the existence of both physical and non-physical world.

References

Nagel, Thomas. The Absurd. 1971: The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 68, No. 20, Sixty-Eighth Annual Meeting of the American Philosophical Association Eastern Division 

Descartes, Rene. Mediations on First Philosophy